Posted
by
timothyon Thursday December 08, 2011 @03:27PM
from the you-mean-ben-afleck-can-you-fly dept.

First time accepted submitter loic_2003 writes "Iranian TV has broadcast footage of an advanced U.S. drone aircraft that Tehran says it brought down using electronic methods to override its controls. The BBC's James Reynolds watched the footage and said the fact that the drone appeared undamaged provided some evidence to support Tehran's version of events. The film was captioned 'RQ170 — advanced U.S. spy plane' and carried on the Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran Network 1 channel."

It's the ultimate weapon against drone aircraft. They flood the control frequencies with Jerry Springer and UFO Conspiracy documentaries, causing the controller to become too stupid to continue flying the aircraft.

It's the ultimate weapon against drone aircraft. They flood the control frequencies with Jerry Springer and UFO Conspiracy documentaries, causing the controller to become too stupid to continue flying the aircraft.

I don't think what that video showed was an American Spy drone.It looked more like a garage kit-bashed fiberglass ooh that would be cool concept of a drone.

Lets see, first the shape. It's a flying wing, and what the heck are those large things standing up on the back like that? It's completely different than anything I've ever seen on any flying wing design before. I'm not a plane expert by any imagination, but still, it looks like something a George Lucas wannabe would build, not the military.It's totally the wrong color, honestly, nothing the military makes is that color, and there's reasons for it. If it was really a spy drone, it would most likely be radar absorbent black. By the way, the SR71 was NEVER flat black when they were in use, it was a special radar absorbent black paint that is still top secret. That paint was completely removed and then repainted with normal aircraft paints before they were transferred to their new non-military homes.What the heck is that grill thing on top, but too far past that wide nose to be a sensor grill, and it's not an air intake either, unless if was cut from an old car radiator.

Cyber warfare implies they took control of it. Not impossible, but let's just say I highly doubt it. Maybe it was electronic warfare and they jammed the control signals. Far more likely, but don't even try and convince me that something that freaking huge for a drone doesn't have a backup plan involving an inertial compass and software to return it to a safe location if it's GPS gets jammed.

Did Iran get an American Drone? Maybe, but I'm pretty sure this thing is NOT it.

I don't think what that video showed was an American Spy drone.It looked more like a garage kit-bashed fiberglass ooh that would be cool concept of a drone. Lets see, first the shape. It's a flying wing, and what the heck are those large things standing up on the back like that? It's completely different than anything I've ever seen on any flying wing design before. I'm not a plane expert by any imagination, but still, it looks like something a George Lucas wannabe would build, not the military.It's totally the wrong color, honestly, nothing the military makes is that color, and there's reasons for it. If it was really a spy drone, it would most likely be radar absorbent black. By the way, the SR71 was NEVER flat black when they were in use, it was a special radar absorbent black paint that is still top secret.

The drone is called the Lockheed RQ-170 Sentinel, AKA "The Beast of Kandahar" after photographs of the thing were snapped at an airfield in Kandahar. Those photos show a fat flying wing, painted a light color, with a pair of distinctive bulges over the "shoulders" of the wings, and a covered inlet above the nose. What the Iranians showed is an RQ-170- or else a decent copy. It is hard to believe the drone came down in one piece, which raises the possibility that this is a fake. It's not clear why they would present a fake, however. The only reason I can imagine is that there just wasn't enough left of the drone to put on TV- perhaps it came down hard and fast and broke into hundreds of little scraps, or perhaps the fuel caught fire and burned up the crash. However, if it's *not* the real drone, the guys who built it should be able to tell, and you would expect the U.S. to come right out and say so.

I seem to recall reading that the communications to the drones are largely unencrypted for some unknown reason, so if that's the case, I could see someone overriding the controls and bringing down the plane.

It seems very unlikely that an uncontrolled aircraft would come down in one piece, yet the US claims that the drone in Iran's possession is one they lost control and track of. The idea that the US could lose track of a piece of technology that size with all their spy satellites and spy planes doesn't seem very likely to me, further lending credence to Iran's story.

Methinks the US may have been caught red-handed spying on Iran. It's not a surprise that they would be doing so, but it is very surprising that they've been sloppy enough to get caught.

Just FYI, most other reports are saying that the United States acknowledges this [sfgate.com] the only incredulity surrounds how the drone went down -- not whether it was there or not. US says technical malfunction. Iran says Allah helped them hack it and control it themselves.

If they did override the controls then surely it wouldn't have to be in Iranian airspace in the first place. Radio waves don't stop at the border after aren't frowned upon like firing missiles into neighboring countries are.

My recollection is that it was only the video feed returned from the drone that was unencrypted. The control signals sent to the aircraft were still encrypted. Even signal jamming is apparently a difficult way to disable the drone because it has a degree of autonomy.

If Iran's claims are true (that it gained control of the plane) then that is either quite an achievement on their part, or quite a failure on the part of the US engineers.

My recollection is that it was only the video feed returned from the drone that was unencrypted. The control signals sent to the aircraft were still encrypted. Even signal jamming is apparently a difficult way to disable the drone because it has a degree of autonomy.

This was my recollection too. I believe it was because the video signal was designed to be able to be seen by troops on the ground in the proximity of the drone, whereas the actual control is done from somewhere in Colorado (or similar). Obviously still should be encrypted, but makes a lot more sense when you realize inter-compatibility was the reason (again, not positive, but that was my recollection).

In this case, most likely the drone failed as the US says. I say that because Iran first claimed they "sh

I seem to recall reading that the communications to the drones are largely unencrypted for some unknown reason, so if that's the case, I could see someone overriding the controls and bringing down the plane.

According to the US government, the drone was CIA operated. The idea that CIA operatives even sneeze unencrypted mucus is ridiculous. They'd be concerned the particulates could reveal something about the operative.

It was either a technical malfunction or plain old jamming of the control signal. The malfunction is more likely, as I'm sure they have better fail-safe procedures for signal jamming.

Methinks the US may have been caught red-handed spying on Iran. It's not a surprise that they would be doing so, but it is very surprising that they've been sloppy enough to get caught.

That could very well be, but the Iranians likely didn't bring it down. The US got caught when the technical malfunction caused the thing to crash. Nevertheless, I doubt the US gives a shit about being caught spying on Iran, they're more concerned about the technology being reverse engineered.

Early command and control systems were considered secure through obscurity and lack of technical ability. Obviously, that isn't the case anymore. I don't know how old the drone design it, but considering that the US is saying all the technology on it is obsolete, then it's probably more than just a year or two old and could be controlled though the 'old school' technique. Now days, command links are encrypted to prevent the bad guys from even eaves dropping on the intel that comes down.

Or you haven't been keeping up. According to various sources (so who really knows), the drone is supposed to go to level flight if it loses control signals, try to figure out where home is and then fly back.

In any event, it's supposed to try to land safely as opposed to destruct or crash. That may have allowed Iranians / Talibans / Islamic Aliens to find the plane, put it on a truck and and make all manner of manly tales of derring do surround it's capture.

I would imagine that folks are re thinking the logic of letting it stay in one piece after control is lost.

"without a gps signal then there's no way you are going to make it 50+ miles back to a safe landing zone without a significant amount of inaccuracy in your position. "

hahaha, no.

We have vehicle with terrain based location systems (TERCOM). I'm not saying this vehicle has one, just that it's possible.

And the can be extremely accurate. All it needs to do is match terrain until it gets close then it can match a landing light pattern. Then land exactly between the lights with about.25 meter of possible error.

Training to land a plane? Iran has plenty of pulots and test pilots capable of jumping into any plane and figuring out how to flyit.

Iran has been studying USA drones over afgahanistan for 7 years. They figured out theunencyrpted video feed quickly. And supplied the Taliban with equipment to recieve such signals on a large enough scale.

Personally i am going to take the superconspiracy theorist view that the CIA landed the plane there with second rate equipment, one to mislead iran, and two to convince the politcains of the weakness of UAV craft so they will order more F-22'S anf F-35's. Bothe of which are made by lockheed.

So you've downed a pristine intact drone from your mortal enemy. Do you A) keep it secret to have an upper hand and send it to a lab to analyze all of its weaknesses and offer this information to your allies or B) take pictures in front of it with propaganda surrounding it and show the world? Well, I guess when you don't know how to do A you have to go with B!

The propaganda they'll get out of taking down one of the mighty U.S. spy drones (and establishing that they ARE, in fact, being spied on by the U.S.) is WAY more valuable to the regime there than any stealth tech they'll get out of it. And they'll still get that tech anyway. It's not like they're not going to tear it apart when the press conferences are all over.

So you've downed a pristine intact drone from your mortal enemy. Do you A) keep it secret to have an upper hand and send it to a lab to analyze all of its weaknesses and offer this information to your allies or B) take pictures in front of it with propaganda surrounding it and show the world? Well, I guess when you don't know how to do A you have to go with B!

I guess they have the ability to do A, but given the recent assassinations of their nuclear scientists and the explosions at their rocket plant and centrifuges, option B is probably a better bet.

It will force the US to rejig the comms to their drones, and promote one hell of a fuss in the US command chain as arses are covered and blame transferred to the least well protected elements.

It also gives them something to crow about, and can legitimately be used to justify at least one retaliatory action.

Lets see here. We're waging robo war in Pakistan, Afganistan, Iraq Yemen - virtually surrounded their whole country - some 100K troops near their borders.We're beating the drums of "Those Iranians are the worst since Hitler..."We're probably assassinating their scientists.We've invaded multiple countries without provocation for a long time, and waged countless covert wars and actions against those we don't like.We supported a proxy war [using our best friend Saddam Hussain - (where have I heard that name before?)] using weapons of mass destruction against the Iranians, using US intelligence.And less than sixty years ago we helped overthrow a democratically elected government in Iran and put in place the Shah. [Who was evil in ways that Hitler *would* understand.]...and if I understand you, you're complaining that the Iranians used some props you find offensive.

You sir, have a most misplaced sense of decency [or a most woefully inadequate knowledge of the history of the dealings of your country].

Of all the offenses betwixt the USA and Iran, I'd posit that the balance isn't even close to parity. The Iranians have a lot of IOU's due against the US. [Like enough to use one every day for a century.]

And less than sixty years ago we helped overthrow a democratically elected government in Iran and put in place the Shah. [Who was evil in ways that Hitler *would* understand.]...and if I understand you, you're complaining that the Iranians used some props you find offensive.

Not to mention the minor fact that Allan Dulles bragged left and right about the CIA hand in the overthrow to the point where every kid in Iran knew the score...

Honestly a drone takeover requires you to be above it. They get control from satellites and AWAC's that are flying ABOVE Them. they do not get controls from ground based transmitters. Plus how did they get their hands on the C&C protocols?

IF they did this, then the USA military electronics is a complete and utter joke. But right now I'm claiming that it glided into the sandy wasteland after it had a failure and they found it.

Wouldn't you expect that n hours after failing to receive commands, and if no coded 'safe' key input, a self-destruct system would trip in? Check that thing for ticking, guys; remember HMS Campbeltown!

When this story first broke, it was cited as response to an American act of aggression. Now we hear that they overrode communications and forced the drone to land. At the very least, the latter seems to me to be something that you'd have to be well prepared to do, in advance. So perhaps the drone was deliberately encroaching on Iranian airspace, but they must have been patiently waiting for their opportunity to pounce.

It's also possible that the drone was patrolling the border from inside Iraq or Afghanistan, and Iran sent radio waves across the border to make the intercept. That's unknown. But by pateience and pouncing or by cross-border override, in either case it seems to me that they've given up the right to shriek in righteous indignation about being violated. The proper response to "Oh No!! Our airspace is being violated!!" would have been to shoot the thing down. There's an air of deliberation here that doesn't square.

Illegally invading another country's sovereign airspace is an act of aggression.

Now we hear that they overrode communications and forced the drone to land.

Any stray military aircraft would also be offered a choice of being forced to land, or be shot down, under the same circumstances.

It's also possible that the drone was patrolling the border from inside Iraq or Afghanistan

The US lately seems to have no problems with crossing borders in Pakistan and Yemen and even killing people there in complete violation of international law. Why would flying over Iran be a problem? You have played the "poor innocent America we mean no harm we come in peace" card far too often. Sorry.

There's an air of deliberation here that doesn't square.

Oh it squares alright. Just like the ICBM launched off the California coast earlier this year oh no sorry it was a "jet". Just like the Chinese sub popping up next to the USS Kitty Hawk and saying hi. Just like the satellite that got blown out of the sky. It says "look what we can do - please invest more trillions in easily circumventable drone technology".

Well, it's their airspace, they can do whatever they like to objects in it.

Besides, I overheard a report on CBS that this drone is a part of a spy drone fleet which was routinely flying over Iran and collecting information for years. If the goal is really to stop foreign spy planes flying over your land, it might be more beneficial to down the plane and showing it to the hole world instead of shooting it down.

The aircraft shown on Iranian television today was not the American stealth drone that crashed in Iran last week, as the Iranian government claimed, but was likely just a model, U.S. officials told ABC News.

Minutes after a Pentagon spokesperson said that military personnel and others were examining the footage broadcast today of what appeared to be an undamaged stealth RQ-170 Sentinel, multiple U.S. officials said that based on inconsistencies with the design of the drone, along with clues from imagery of the actual drone's crash site, the drone shown was not the Sentinel. U.S. officials previously confirmed that an RQ-170 did, in fact, crash land somewhere in Iran.

What battlefield advantage? Anything they MIGHT have will be wiped out by B2 stealth bombers before any other shots are fired.

If anything, Iran gets to wave this at the Security Council (china and russia are pals with veto power) when the US wants to "librate" them. Nukes or not, Iran has not attacked the US or Israel directly, or violated any airspace under their operation. The US can't exactly say the same, can they.

Iran is not going to make the same mistake playing chicken with the US like Iraq did. Israel has already played our hand with the unprovoked attack on Iran's nuclear development (pissing off China and Russia)

Their goal is to talk smack to get Israel to keep stepping over the line... They are not attacking anybody right now.... Playing "fair" is not the same as violating international law and Iran is playing very carefully.

Despite extensive covering on the underside, to me it looks TOO fresh and undamaged. It doesn't look used at all

I think this is a mold reproduction of whatever they did get, faired out the damaged areas, swapped over a few parts and the paint is is still wet. There is nothing underneath it, its just a surface shell that looks right.

Just like the CIA changed its story, you mean? "Drone, what drone?" to "It's possible we've lost one in Afghanistan, but no one took it down" to "Yeah, it's probably ours. But it didn't enter their airspace" to "Well, it might have strayed accidentally into their airspace." At some point in the future, when all is said and declassified, I'm sure we'll learn it was on a spy mission in the middle of Iran.

The revolution failed.The US military is pulling out of Iraq.The propaganda "Iran is a terrorist" is ramping up. Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iran.UN resolutions to fill the requisite paperwork so it's all "legal".Economic sanctions on major exports.There have been softening up attacks on the defences and other strategic targets.

All that's left to do really is have some "event" which will be seen as an act of war on the part of Iran as justification. Some Arch Duke Ferdinand.

I see you have enrolled and will be in the first APCs in the firing line. Or not?

They are more of a danger than Iraq ever was

They are certainly more dangerous, the drone capture kind of demonstrates that in itself. No?They are also battle hardened.They are also 4 times the size of Iraq.The place is mountains not flat desert.They are religious zealots.They defeated Iraq using human wave attacks against superior weaponry.They have had a decade of isolation to improve their military.They supply oil to China. China just sent a very public but unofficial message that they were likely to go to war over Iran.Oil will hit another peak and cause a bigger depression.Russia is an Iranian ally who supplies gas to Europe.Russia just went on missile alert and warned the west they were moving their ballistic missile launchers into position.

It's going to be pretty funny if the US moves all its military aircraft technology to unmanned operation (which seems to be the trend at the moment), and suddenly someone figures out how to take control of them all electronically, rendering the US military completely impotent overnight.

On most modern 2.4 Ghz R/C radios (such as Spektrum, etc), there is a 'bind' procedure that locks the transmitter and receiver together and prevents someone else from overridding the controls and to prevent interference from other transmitters. Granted the system used to control this drone is more sophisticated (hopefully), but you would think a similar system would be in place.

That may be a bad assumption seeing as there was an article recently reporting that it was possible to intercept the video feed from U.S. drones.

All you need is a simple jammer that broadcasts over the entire spectrum that the enemy is using.

There's a lot more to jamming than that. Unless your transmitter is absurdly more powerful than the one you're trying to jam out, spread spectrum transmissions can be extremely difficult to jam. The receiver is looking for (simplified here) modulation in a signal pattern. If you know the exact pattern you are looking for, you can very effectively filter out the noise. Then you just demodulate the signal to get your information out clean.

So when brute force isn't going to cut it, you have to really know what you're trying to jam, and more than likely you are going to have to be able to adapt, because critical control systems like this will have multiple fail-over procedures in place to automatically hop to a different band, modulation, whatever they care to mix up to render your jamming ineffective.

Providing a very simple example of why brute force doesn't work: get a whistle, and some really loud speakers and stereo. Have a friend stand by the speaker, occasionally blowing the whistle (maybe in a coded pattern that provides you with information), while the stereo cranks out the sound at ear-splitting levels. Standing 300 feet away, can you hear when the whistle blows? No you can't, the music is jamming you. Now get out a little handheld mic with headphones, and $15 in radio shack hardware for making a notch filter, tuned to the frequency of the whistle. Listen to that. You may hear a very faint trace of the music, but the whistle will be loud and clear every time its blown. Jamming is overcome. Doesn't really matter if you crank up the volume on the music either. Now what if the music happens to hit the note of the whistle and plays a solid or repeating tone at that frequency? So you start hearing that and can't tell when its the whistle or the music. Now your friend can see you waving your arms around indicating you can't hear him, so he puts that whistle in his pocket and takes out a different whistle. You flip a switch on your gear to switch the notch frequency for the next whistle. Now you're back in business. That's how jamming works, brute force often is ineffective.

You are describing signal jamming tech (single-channel, sine-wave) that is decades old.

Modern EW platforms are capable of covering entire RF bands, adapting and following hopping schemes, and efficiently spreading their energy over seemingly pseudo-random code-schemes.

In the end, there's only so much you can do with modulation techniques - it comes down to signal strength - and the inverse-square-law pretty much says that who-ever gets closer wins.

The control signal from the US base comes likely via LEO sat-link or over-the-horizon AWACS-type platform - both of which are going to be hundreds of kilometers away. You're not going to need "absurdly more powerful" anything to interfere with that. I have a wide-band I/Q generator able to modulate any mathematically describable code-sheme - which I could then hook up to our MIL-STD-461 susceptibility testing-chamber-amp - and knowing something about the signal band I could easily get the right high-gain antenna to track the bastard off the sky... and all this is with off-the-shelf COTS equipment!

Evidently you think American engineers are idiots.
The frequency hopping patterns for drone communications are produced by a cryptographically-secure random number generator with a pre-negotiated seed. Snoop it all you like; this isn't your neighbor with unsecured wifi, it's your neighbor with AES512 and a fifty-word passphrase surfing over a VPN tunnel.

"Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes' systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber -- available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet -- to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter."

Hate to break it to you buy the Predator and first run Reaper drones have completely unencrypted communications links, the com links on later drones might actually be up to snuff but there's no guarantee of that since they aren't public. The drones with unencrypted communications are still in the field since they're too valuable to pull for an overhaul.

It would seem likely that drones have inertial navigation systems as well, for just that eventuality.

Sure, INS isn't the most accurate system around, but having some sort of fail-safe "If GPS is jammed and control signal is lost, go to $ALTITUDE and turn toward $DIRECTION until communications are restored (presumably by being out of ranging of the offending jamming)." rule would be a sensible thing to have programmed into the drone's control systems.

With frequency hopped spread spectrum, even if some of the hop frequencies are jammed, the transmitted symbols will not necessarily be because they can be spread over multiple hops. It does not have to be a transmitter that dwells on a single frequency long enough to send some information. A single symbol can be spread over multiple hops.

Even if you manage to disrupt 5% of the bits of a spread-spectrum signal, this can easily be repaired by sufficient amounts of Forward Error Correction Bits. Look it up in wikipedia. Proper spread-spectrum links such as SINCGARS (now decades old) are virtually impossible to jam effectively. You would need your own power station and transmitters capable of transforming that into RF to completely saturate from (say) 10 MHz to 85 MHz to take out a SINCGARS link.

This needs to be repeated. We used SINCGARS when I was in the Army over 20 years ago. I can not be jammed. I can not be eavesdropped. It changes frequency over 100 times a second. If you gave the guy who invented it the previous 10 minutes of frequencies, he could not tell you what the next frequency is going to be.

Again, this was over 20 years ago. I seriously hope that our military is at least using the same SINCGARS I used when I was in the Army.

People have built hobby quadcopters with built-in GPS that autonomously travel from one place to the next. How difficult could it possibly be to give a drone an instruction that says "in the event of loss of contact with the base station, ascend to altitude and return to base".

Or if you wanted to discourage jammers, "in the event of a loss of contact with the base station, lock hellfire missiles onto the nearest potential targets and fire, then RTB" Then we could have the "scumbag jammers" meme. Scumbag

Actually, many drones are programmed to just fly home if the signal is lost. From Wired: "Like just about every spy drone operating today, the RQ-170 can follow GPS waypoints, instead of being steered by a remote operator. And when drones like the Sentinel loses radio or satellite contact with their human overlords, they are usually programmed to do something reasonable, ranging from circling until contact is resumed to continuing with the mission autonomously to flying home. Moreover, Pentagon spokesman C

What I don't understand is why they didn't have it wired to self-destruct, at least the internal systems if not the entire aircraft.

AFAIK, manned Air Force aircraft are equipped with labels on the sensitive avionics and components saying something like "in case of imminent capture, shoot here to destroy." I'd think that self-destruct would be an absolute requirement for a drone.

I mean, the USAF is pretty darn good at destroying things. You'd think if you were flying it over hostile territory you'd at least equip it with enough thermite to make the electronics and optics go away should the drone lose contact with HQ for longer than some preset time period.

Or maybe that's what happened in a kinder, gentler fashion. Maybe a self-destruct did happen to the internals, including the flight controllers. The "my-controller-has-melted" control-arm position might be preset to a glide configuration so that it will cause the least amount of civilian damage if it goes down.

Or maybe it was deliberate. Maybe it's a Trojan horse with a secret compartment filled with VX or anthrax or something, on a remote control that can be triggered by an operator when Ahmadenijad gets close enough to gloat. "Remember the tooth."

Don't kid yourself. They're military grade, and they're military-grade priced. And the tech inside is all American sourced chips, as they don't trust foreign chip foundries for this kind of stuff.

But a few ounces of thermite or C4 are cheap insurance. Not being remote commanded while inside enemy airspace? Blow it up.

The Iranians didn't remotely operate this device. They might have jammed its frequencies, as that's within their technical capabilities. But nobody's breaking the military encryption. It's not a Panasonic web cam being remotely operated and subject to URL tampering.

I mean given that hobby R/C work pretty much the same way, just way smaller scale, who would have thought that you could override a remote signal.

It works *nothing* like an R/C model, aside from the fact that radio signals are somehow involved. R/C models are flown "by hand", i.e. the pilots manipulate the elevator/ailerons/throttle etc directly. The drones are almost entirely flown by the on-board autopilot, flight management computer, and inertial navigation. These are indeed connected via radio to the control center but rest assured, it is not being intercepted or overridden by external agencies.

This one had a malfunction, went into a fail-safe mode, ran out of fuel, and landed more-or-less intact. Of course they are claiming more than that.

Would it give Iran any great insight into US technology? Or anything of that nature?

Intelligence agencies think that China has been providing a lot of technical assistance to Iran (as well as other nations). The Iranians have some experience reverse engineering older, simpler aircraft (Their Saeqeh [wikipedia.org] fighter is a virtual clone of Northrop's F-5. The only visual difference is twin vertical stabilizers), but no one thinks the Iranians have any experience with things like shaping, radar-absorbent coatings, or composite structures.

No, on something like an RQ-170... which is state of the art stuff... they're probably going to need Chinese help. China has a lot of advanced US tech already (recall the F-35 tech that fell into their hands), and is working on actual stealth aircraft themselves.

I seriously doubt the Iranians brought the drone down with "cyber-warfare". Witness how they were absolutely owned with the virus in their nuclear facilities. It was probably a malfunction on the part of the drone that brought it down, but regardless, the technology is almost certainly going to be in Chinese hands soon. Maybe that's for the best, in a perverse way, as USAF puts entirely too much reliance on stealth technology (when there are much, much cheaper ways to counter that technology in combat). Perhaps the US will start to build fighters with traditional fighter attributes again, and ones that don't cost $150 million+ apiece. I'm not quite in the Pierre Sprey absolute-minimalist school of fighter design (Pierre thinks that things like radar are a bad idea), but I do think we should build military aircraft that are affordable enough (and more reliable) to buy in large quantities. 183 air superiority fighters... no matter how good they may be... ain't gonna get it. But when 5 fighters cost you over a billion bucks, right off the production line, well... that's all you're going to get.

Further, this sort of thing exposes in a very blatant way how the DoD and the contractors responsible for developing these vehicles have made little to no effort to safeguard them from radio interference

According the NYT, it is exceedingly unlikely that Iran captured the drone with some of cyber attack.

Of course, at this point, who knows who's lying. But I would not take Iran at their word.

Also, before you get all pissy about the US invading Iran's airspace, maybe you should look into Iran's recent history.

Guess that depends on your definition of "disposable". The Wiki article doesn't list the cost of this UAV, but the MQ-9 Reaper is estimated at over $30 million apiece. But with the way Obama and the other neocons spend money, I guess that's small change to him.

Roughly the same cost as an F-15. Cheaper than an F-22 (around 200 million a pop depending on how you count things) and about what a hit movie [msn.com] brings in on midnight showings. (Just for some perspective).

The SR71 was rendered obsolete by satellites. The Wiki article on the RQ-170 is pretty sparse on details (since the thing is shrouded in secrecy), but at appears to have some weapons capability, something the SR71 never had.

The real element that makes aircraft like the SR71 more immune to being downed by the Iranians, however, isn't flying high and fast, it's having a human pilot in the aircraft instead of relying on easily-jammed radio for control.

the SR71 was rendered obsolete because it was expensive.. it was to be the replace ment for the U2 but failed to be cheaper than keping the U2 (which is why the U2 is still in service).

Both the U2 and the SR71 are useful compared to satellites because they can be dispatched to an area for information far quicker than a satellite. (and cheaper for short term recon).

the Drones are the replacement for the U2.. so far they are falling behind - one of the requirements of them - is that they are cheaper than the U2 program. (only time will tell with that one).

But the high and fast are feature+ for the U2 over the current drones.. Most missile systems are not able to identify and shoot down a U2 before it leaves the missiles operating range. (if you look at the U2's that where shot down, several of them went down not because a missile made contact but because the light air-frame broke up at altitude from the shock waves of the missiles blowing up lower int the atmosphere)

I have some friends that are ex military (USAF and US Army) that sent all their buddies that were still in and I can back up what you are saying, as nearly all of them wanted me to load games and apps on big flash drives. I had never heard of a "game stick' as they called it and it was explained to me that while there are PCs everywhere the connections are locked down and spotty so they just load games on the sticks and that way when they have down time they can "data dump" as they called it and unwind with some games.

Looking at the video in TFA I have to agree that it doesn't look really damaged so either a computer bug from those bazillion flash sticks brought it down or they had an engine malfunction and it autoglided itself to a landing. maybe its because i'm not a military guy but I was amazed that they all just walk around popping sticks in everywhere, that is the kind of crap i would have brought to a screeching halt when i was working corporate and i can't believe that the US military just lets them go around popping sticks. Hell with the kind of money we spend on the military they ought to just contract out to one of the OEMs to have a nice ruggedized AMD netbook handed out to each soldier and then epoxy all the USB ports on the work machines.